Centre Pompidou

The Centre Pompidou describes a collection and research structure that joins modern and contemporary art with film, sound, digital media, design, and architecture. Its organisational page states that the National Museum of Modern Art / Industrial Design Center inventories, conserves, restores, presents, and documents collections that include new media. It names separate new-media and restoration departments and identifies the Kandinsky Library as a research and documentation centre with a reading room. These are stated institutional functions; they are not, by themselves, proof of every conservation workflow.

The Film and New media collection overview dates this collection to 1976 and describes film, video, sound, and digital media as emerging and ephemeral media. It states that newly acquired works are preserved in their original format. That statement establishes institutional intent; the Zapping Zone case below documents conservation research on a named work.

The Centre's public-access system is also plural. Pompidou+ describes more than 200,000 freely accessible digital resources across collection records, videos, podcasts, virtual exhibitions, educational resources, and audiovisual archives. The research index exposes language options including French, English, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, German, Portuguese, and Russian. Object identity is connected to distinct research and access formats across those language routes.

Close reading: Vera Molnar, Sans titre

The Centre's object record for Vera Molnar's Sans titre identifies the work as a 1970 drawing from the cycle “A la recherche de Paul Klee.” It records the artist, title, date, algorithmic-drawing description, Chinese ink on paper, dimensions of 30 × 30 cm, 2002 acquisition, and inventory number AM 2002-84. Its bibliography includes page and figure references and links to the Bibliothèque Kandinsky catalogue.

Its structure keeps work identity, series, material description, acquisition, inventory, and bibliography in separate fields. For a chain-native museum, the equivalent is to keep token and project identity, work medium, technical constitution, acquisition event, rights status, and research references separately addressable and cross-linked.

Conservation case: Zapping Zone

The Centre's research and restoration page for Chris Marker's Zapping Zone describes a 1990 interactive installation composed of thirteen television sets, seven Apple II GS computer stations, four luminous displays containing eighty slides, and ten photomontages. The page documents a PATRIMA research project with two researchers and the C2RMF, historical-documentation study, photographic and radiographic documentation of the Apple II GS computers, and technical service of the original equipment. It also describes planned reinstallation and the reactivation of obsolete programs.

The page demonstrates conservation research by naming the work's components, researchers, partner, documentary method, and technical actions. It describes the exhibition and future public availability as planned outcomes; their completion requires later evidence. The Museum's preservation records should make the same temporal distinction.

The Centre's longer research writing applies the same caution to online exhibition history. In “Erreur 404: une histoire de l'exposition artistique en ligne”, published 22 July 2025, Hugo du Plessix describes research based on eleven interviews and more than sixteen hours of exchanges. The essay retains funding instability, changing technical roles, obsolete tools, and criticism of simply reproducing the white cube online. It treats institutional history as contested infrastructure, with loss and inaccessibility left visible.

What the Museum should adopt

• make object records resolve to bibliography, research, access, and preservation manifestations without merging their different purposes;
• describe digital works through components, software or hardware, duration, display conditions, dependencies, and technical status;
• separate completed conservation actions from planned reinstallation, reactivation, or public-access outcomes;
• preserve the distinction between original formats and access manifestations;
• publish the participants, methods, unresolved questions, and evidence limits of research projects;
• offer language and accessibility metadata for each public manifestation.

Where the analogy ends

An object page is not a complete conservation report, and a large digital resource count is not evidence that every resource is deeply connected to its object. The Zapping Zone page documents a research and restoration project, but its planned outputs must not be recorded as completed preservation. The Museum should transfer the Centre's separations between identity, research, technical evidence, and public access—not its scale or resource volume.

Sources

1. Centre Pompidou, “Divisions and departments”.
2. Centre Pompidou, “Film and New media”.
3. Centre Pompidou, “Sans titre” — Vera Molnar, 1970 work date shown.
4. Centre Pompidou, “Zapping Zone, Chris Marker”.
5. Centre Pompidou, “Pompidou+”.
6. Hugo du Plessix, “Erreur 404: une histoire de l'exposition artistique en ligne”, 22 July 2025.

Revision history

• 1.0.0 — 2026-08-04: corrected the object record, revised to public scholarship, and added direct first-party claim links, a work close reading, conservation research, and explicit evidence limits.